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steveatwaywords's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
This was my first experience reading Diaz, and I was frankly humbled by the political and fleshly intimacy that entwines itself through her lines. Mostly a book which explores love (and refreshingly gender oblique for all its sensuality), Diaz wrestles with the devotion and responsibility to family, to living the occluded citizenship of America, to reconciling the deliberate impoverishment of daily life to the potency of the natural world.
Along the way, Diaz offers us a nearly literal museum tour of Mojave history, a brutal spiritual of her identification with rivers, a mesmerizing submersion into classical allusion.
Do not enter her poetry expecting a fast or wholly polarizing read of indigenous politics or people. Instead her verse blends the metaphorical and the dream, the familiar-remade and the unfamiliar regathered. One leaves her poetry understanding that any explanation of what was read fails its subject, that--like reading Harjo or Eileen Myles--the breathing of the words are itself its weight.
I think too much--
Each morning the Minotauromachy.
Through the night I swing the sickle of my wonders,
a harvest-work--of touch and worry.
...
I am every answer--
a mathematics of anxiety. How any maul can solve
the mesquite tree for the pyre.
Along the way, Diaz offers us a nearly literal museum tour of Mojave history, a brutal spiritual of her identification with rivers, a mesmerizing submersion into classical allusion.
Do not enter her poetry expecting a fast or wholly polarizing read of indigenous politics or people. Instead her verse blends the metaphorical and the dream, the familiar-remade and the unfamiliar regathered. One leaves her poetry understanding that any explanation of what was read fails its subject, that--like reading Harjo or Eileen Myles--the breathing of the words are itself its weight.
I think too much--
Each morning the Minotauromachy.
Through the night I swing the sickle of my wonders,
a harvest-work--of touch and worry.
...
I am every answer--
a mathematics of anxiety. How any maul can solve
the mesquite tree for the pyre.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug use and Sexual content
readingbrb's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism
Minor: Addiction and Drug use